She thought about things, severally, eventually crumbling down to questioning existence and everything about it. From a time when people lived in cities to now, where they had their very own private space shuttles, why was it that no one had been able to figure out what everything meant? We're they just not paying attention to it anymore? Had they given up? Didn't they care?

She looked outside at the asteroid belt - so many rocks which no one had bothered to explore. What if they contained everything that anyone could hope to know? Why weren't people curious anymore? How could they be content with all that they had? Didn't they want more?

Abruptly. A beep sound passed through her thoughts and into her mind. She looked to the screen. It had found a suitable server for her to play on. Finally... , she thought, gripping her controller. Existential crisises could wait, there was a game to play and boy, was she gonna play it.

Out in space, on a route like this, you begin to lose a sense of time. Or perhaps it is time itself that becomes senseless after so much time alone.

It was Kat's turn on watch. Ships like this practically pilot themselves, so there wasn't much work to be done. Occasionally she would glance over the vast array of dials and screens, making sure nothing was out of order.

Out the window the planet ED4-2076 floated on by.

Nothing ever happened. She wasn't sure what she was to do if something did happen. She would probably just wake the Captain out of cryo and let him deal with it.

She sighed and sank down into the pilots chair. It would be two weeks before somebody would take her place. Her legs propped up on the dash, she flicked the pilot's screen on.

And out there among a million worlds, she fell deep into her one of her own making.

I stared aimlessly at the list of high scores as my spacecraft drifted inside an asteroid belt. M-E-G. All the names were the same. I must have beaten this game a thousand times already. I looked over the date on the computer screen. January 1st, 1982. Wow. It's been ten years. Happy New Year to me.
What was I doing in space, you ask? Let's rewind to 1971. It was a successful year for the United States, having landed Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 on the moon. Of course, this was after the moon landing in 1969, and the USSR had already decided to concentrate their efforts elsewhere; namely, orbital space stations. It wasn't anything special, or so we thought. There's no way they could top the moon landing.
Or so we thought.
In August of 1971, we received news of the deaths of the USSR Soyuz 11 crew, who completed a record 22-day stay in a space station. It was due to a faulty cabin pressure valve, which caused the cabin to lose all pressure. Or so we thought.

3 days later, we received a message from the USSR. They requested a urgent, top-secret meeting as soon as possible. I was a rising star in NASA at the time. it's a little known fact that I saved the entire crew during the failed Apollo 13 moon landing attempt. So, they decided to bring me along.

"Everything I'm about to tell you right now is the truth, no matter how far-fetched it sounds. The leak was not due to a faulty cabin pressure valve. It was aliens. That was the final message from the Soyuz 11 crew. And that's not all. We received a unknown transmission that we have yet to decipher. Please, believe me. I know our countries are at odds with each other, but the entire human race could be in danger."

These were the words of Sergei Korolev, the lead Soviet rocket engineer.

We were speechless. Aliens? Impossible. Or was it? The universe was infinitely large. It is highly improbable that we are the only sentiment beings inside it. But mind you, this was during the Cold War. This could easily be a hoax to make us withdraw from the Space Race.

"Let's say we take your story to be true. What do you want us to do about it? We have no way to combat aliens," said Kennedy.

"We do not want to combat them. We want to befriend them, and learn more about them."

"And how do you suggest we do this?"

"By sending out an ambassador, who will represent Earth."

"You're insane! That's a suicide mission! Who in their right mind would do such a thing?"

The whole room began arguing, but I was lost in imagination at this point. Aliens! It was my dream to be the first human to contact them. I knew that I was the girl for the job.

"I'll do it!" I said, with a huge grin across my face.

I heard murmurs across the room.

"Who is this girl?"

"Who does she think she is?"

"Is she even qualified?"

"Is she even of age?"

"Silence!" Sergei commanded. "I commend you on your bravery, but do you know what you're getting yourself into? There will be no turning back."

"Yes, I do."

"Very well. We have a craft prepared, but I daresay your engineers would like to take a look at it first. I will contact you when preparations are done."

That was 11 years ago. Ever since the launch, I've just been drifting aimlessly in space. What a bore. I wanna see some action! This wasn't what I dreamed of. I stared out into the bleak, empty darkness.

Empty? Wasn't I in an asteroid belt? I sat up abruptly, my heart beating like a drum against my chest. I turn on my radio.

I hate waiting. It is always in the empty spaces between missions that I remember... And I can't do that, won't. It's too painful. So I distract myself. This time its something ancient. An illegal game from a forgotten age, a data-relic from a time when computing was still in its infancy and aliens were as insubstantial as the boogeyman.
Space invaders. Surprisingly challenging for a game so simple. Alien invaders come down from space, bent on destruction. All you have to do is shoot the invaders before they destroy earth. The aliens don't use any tactics, they don't deceive you, and they don't throw everything they have at you. If only we had known it wasn't going to be that kind of an invasion...
When the invaders came they didn't come with hoards of ships, or lasers blasting, with destruction of cities or alien biologies. They infiltrated. They worked on it for the better part of two centuries. They came as normal humans, they became a part of society, of politics, science, literature and history. They took over everything. It was a coup no one knew about, because we voted them into office. We campaigned for them, we supported them, and when they decided to move for world peace, for disarmament and social control and more security and less privacy, we praised them for it. They were the cause of scientific advances that solved the world's problems. Infinite food to solve world hunger, cures for all disease, peace drugs to stop crime and aggression. We thought we had done it, created utopia.
The problem with peace is that when there is no war, no crime, no aggression, there are no weapons. No way to defend ourselves. No reason to think we would ever need to.
So when the invasion fleet did come, they met no resistance. There was nothing to resist them with. They were already our leaders. Leaders we had trusted, and had given all power to. They gave us peace, then came to take our sovereignty. Our freedom, and independance.
The takeover had been so thorough that most people were fine with the invasion. They had forgotten what freedom was. But some of us didn't. Some of us still yearn for diversity. We yearn for the right to challenge the ideas of our leaders without fear of being labeled as 'aggressive' and being drugged, having our memories wiped, or worse... like my parents...
Which is why I'm waiting. Playing space invaders. Not thinking about the past. And dying. The game beeps at me. High-score. Yay. I shut the game off and look at the chrono. Five minutes till the weapons transport arrives. Time to power up. The aliens aren't the only ones who can be sneaky.

Like, there's nothing that makes life fun than being in space, amirite? Yeah, no. I got facebook, tumblr, twitter, I have xbox but it's boring has hell. Sure, my first few days were all, omygosh I'm up in space, the final frontier. But I've been here now for oh, three years? I don't even remember anymore. Time sucks when you're not rotating around and around like a ballerina.

I yawn as I frag another noob in Call of Duty Extreme Waste of Time. The twelve year old calls my mother a few choice names and tries to camp on my spawn point. Headshot. Then he accuses me of using an aimbot. Lame.

I log out of the server and surf Facebook. It used to be entertaining, keeping up with my friends who were still stragged on earth. Even then, they grew on with their lives sans Elissa. More Lame. I couldn't be arsed to care if their new friends and sitch's got them in some major drama hot water, they were too far away and I wasn't part of their world anymore, literally.

First Teenager in Space! The newspapers all exclaimed. Like I was some kind of prodigal child who was able to write differential equations in her sleep. My dad was an astrophysicist and my mom was a math major. I learned algebra before I learned the alphabet. And now I was on a mission to go find some junk called dark matter. Yeah, boring, amirite? I just wanted to eat junkfood and hang out with my friends.

I just know that once this lame mission is over, I'll be able to go home. It'll be a drag, though. Most of my friends will have totally forgotten about me and the only people who'll want to hang out with me are creepy old men who want to poke at the inside of my brain to see what everything is like. But fuck me right?

"Three years in space today. Such a drag. #nolife #spaceisboring #spacehasnoatmosphere" I tweeted and watched as three more people unfollowed me. Lame.